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The Outer Limits
1963 · TV series · 2 seasons
Created by Leslie Stevens
The Outer Limits is an anthology tv series of self-contained sci-fi-horror stories, sometimes with a plot twist at the end.
6 positive16 neutralfrom 22 commenters
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24 comments on Hacker News
I spent some time experimenting with AI art. He's right that it doesn't look right somehow most of the time. But in my case, if I started with a photograph I took and extracted its silhouette lines as the basis for the image I was generating, I got something a lot harder to distinguish from manually generated art.
He's right about the motives of tech Bros and executives here. But I don't think he's right about where AI will eventually go because I think it will become pervasive because it almost already is.
It's ridiculously optimistic to think you can run a 1 trillion parameter model on a phone anytime soon. So those data centers have a power generation problem and their limitation will be the extent to which the power generation problem is solved.
I just don't think AI is going to crash. But if you look at ridiculous valuations and PE ratios higher than 100 or so, timber! But crashing to 20 to 50 (CSCO after the crash from 200) is just the market pulling its own head out of its butt so I suppose there's the bubble. Good luck, however, figuring out when. Also, CSCO is still here. He really ought to look around at how many people have outsourced their thinking and writing to large language models already.
I'm a bit reminded of this Outer Limits episode minus the BCI:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667957/plotsummary/
I don't think senior talent will get replaced anytime soon, but I also think that one or two fundamental innovations down the road on par with the Attention is All You Need paper will make AI dramatically better at tasks that don't require embodiment. Those innovations seem to occur every couple years across the sector. But again, good luck. predicting when and how.
See also: https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-addressing-the-gap-between-supply-and-demand
Before we fire all the radiologists, we'll have to centaur the crap out of them just to meet demand. But that doesn't fit his narrative so he left that out because I'm sure he's aware of it.
Theres an abridged fan version of the chinese 3 body series uploaded for free online, its in 3 movie length installments.
https://disembiggened.com/
Theres also Ethernaut, an Argentinian series that I think just has one series so far. People enjoy it, I didn't find it that interesting til the end. I just really dislike stories stretched thin over dozens of hours. I prefer Xfiles, Outer Limits, or aimple movies, that sort of scifi.
Sounds very Outer Limits-esque, but I don't recall that specific episode. It's certainly at least an easy interpolation from many Outer Limits episodes, though.
Reminds me of this episode of The Outer Limits https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667978/
> A desperate dying man injects himself with experimental nanobots that can supposedly cure anything. It works, but then his body starts to hideously mutate. He asks his soon-to-be brother-in-law, who invented the nanobots, for help.
"2010: The Year We Make Contact" is a much more accessible movie that holds up pretty well. It also feels like a payoff after investing so much time being confused/bored by 2001.
I was 11 when "Logan's Run" came out. Yes it's kinda loaded with 70's sex tropes for the first act, but it's also equal parts goofy and a really good film.
The original "The Day The Earth Stood Still" holds up.
"A Boy and His Dog" is a bit crude here and there, but might resonate with a 12yo.
"Quatermass and the Pit" (aka "Five Million Years to Earth") is both intense and fairly tame.
A lot of old TV series hold up - Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, UFO, Space 1999, Star Trek TOS, etc all have some excellent episodes.
I absolutely love "Dark City" and "12 Monkeys" but I'm not sure they'd have held my interest at 12.
Doctor Who, both old and new are excellent. Though I'm partial to the Tom Baker era.
The Stargate franchise is pretty good.
"Moon" (2009) is a bit cerebral but a good SF story.
One show: X Files.
1990s Vancouver. Rain. Grey. Science fiction changed from the bright colors of LA (Star Trek) to Vancouver's rain forests (X Files, Stargate, Outer Limits). Why were Star Trek's colors so bright? Desi Loe Studios paid extra for the color film and wanted to use it. X files was on a tight budget and couldn't afford to brighten Vancouver enough to make it look like California. So the backgrounds become dark and grey.
Similar things happened in many film. Alien had budget problems and difficult creature effects. Net result: hide everything in darkness. The color has as much to do with budget as art.
This was an Outer Limits episode.
https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/White_Light_Fever
The Outer Limits has an episode on this (Think Like a Dinosaur) which explores the ethical implications of transporters by explicitly separating the steps of the process (where destruction of the original is a separate and final step).
This feels like it might fit a series like The X-Files or The Outer Limits more than a full movie; there isn't much more to it than the twist; aside from that it's a story about some people.
If you don't mind them being shorts, there are some good sci-fi stories on the Dust and Omeleto channels on YouTube. e.g. this "One Minute Time Machine" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY - has just two people, a bench, and a Time MacGuffin.
Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOwKExagzdQ - "The Tunnel Ahead", 15 minute short set in an overpopulated world.
I do feel that many include space because it's fun and can be CGI modelled, or time travel because it makes for a cheap sci-fi plot, and if you rule those out you get things like The OceanMaker ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWCGK4nneeU ) which I didn't like so much because nothing really happens. Whether there are more concepty ones with more nuanced plot, they probably didn't catch my eye to watch.
Like I wrote in response to a comment here, a short story exploring this exact scenario was "Think Like a Dinosaur", later made into an Outer Limits episode [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur
There's an Outer Limits episode with a transporter-like device, but it merely makes an exact "copy" of the person and the machine automatically destroys the "original".
I don't recall the episode name off-hand, or want to give away too much of the plot, but I thought that was better than the duplicate Rikers.
Also: two Crichtons in Farscape, although that wasn't due to a transporter-like accident but a "normal" clone.
Before Star Trek Ellison also did two episodes of The Outer Limits; actually, IIRC this is how he ended up writing for Star Trek, because Bob Justman worked with him before on The Outer Limits. In one of them a soldier accidentally travels back in time to the then-present day (aptly named "Soldier").
In the first draft script Ellison wrote the time-travel scene had the soldier "flying through time" with spaceships and dinosaurs and what-have-you. They explained it was a great script but far too expensive to film due to all the required special effects, and told him to rewrite it to be cheaper. "Okay!", and so he went away to rewrite it. He came back and ... time-travel scene was still there! They again explained that filming the time-travel scene alone would cost several episodes worth of budget, and was simply an impossibility. He did not seem to understand; in his mind that scene was simply essential.
Needless to say, that episode was also not shot the way Ellison wrote it.
(This episode, together with the Demon with a Glass Hand episode he did for The Outer Limits, were allegedly plagiarized by James Cameron in the Terminator film – I have never seen any strong resemblances myself beyond some very superficial details; I guess the studio settled to avoid trouble, but it just seemed like Ellison being his difficult self more than anything else. He was a funny man, but also a difficult one with something of a vicious mean streak at times.)
Years ago, and it might have stolen the story from somewhere else, there was a Twilight Zone/Outer Limits/Tales from the Darkside type show and in one episode space explorers are visiting the remains of a charred planet ~2,000 light years away. They learn the star that went supernovae and that it is the star the three wise men followed to Bethlehem.
I'm certainly not the only one to think of this.
I know of Twilight Zone episodes to have used that. Specifically one I can think of is the Dachau Nazi "doctor" comes back to relive his glory days, and is forced by the ghosts who still live there to forcefully feel their pain for the rest of his life. It's supernatural, but still the same idea.
There were also episodes of Outer Limits that did similar, but with a machine that forced them to live with the crime they committed.
I believe Black Mirror also did some of this as well.
Thanks. I keep meaning to get around to Black Mirror where there's an Expect script. And I spent forever getting accepted into the WordPerfect Macro community to look at an old episode of The Outer Limits.
One day I'll have time...
Theres also an Outer Limits episode of a guy trapped on another planet who self replicates clones of himself. Although I think it does it more through "splitting" than an actual birth cycle. Very freaky episode with lots of "body-horror" as he begins to split.
"Star Trek" as an abstract concept across franchises has always been a few things. It's always been about interesting, and generally likable, characters and a backdrop setting of extensive space exploration, a galaxy full of many civilizations and so forth. That's a comparatively small but still important part of Star Trek. Star Trek has always been a kind of anthology project similar to The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, except it has used a constant cast of characters and setting, which makes it easier to get to moments that have more significant impact on the viewer. You already know and are invested in the characters, and their different traits can be used to help tell the story. This is both the weakness and strength of Star Trek, leading to some of its worst but also some of its best stories, stories that show what literary SciFi is capable of achieving. TOS episodes like The City on the Edge of Forever, TNG episodes like The Inner Light or Chain of Command, DS9 episodes like Far Beyond the Stars, etc.
Additionally, Star Trek has always had a strong set of progressive values (peace, reconcilliation, cooperation, honesty, etc.) and has used its story telling to further those values. It put a black woman and a Russian man on the bridge of the Enterprise during the height of the civil rights fight and the height of the Cold War. It's pushed progressive causes for decades, even when it was risky to do so within the confines of the television studio system. There was an episode of TNG that tackled issues of homosexuality and gender identity in the '90s, for example, and of course there's that famous interracial kiss on the original series.
The new Trek seems to be substantially in the same vein here, though it's still a bit early to make a definitive call. The diversity of the cast is very nice to see, and the mixture of "episodic anthology show" and long-running plot is pretty well done and keeping with the tradition of Trek going back even to the original show. It'll take more episodes to see how good the show is ultimately, but so far it's doing pretty well.
The question I always ask is: If it were not "scan, destruction, reconstruction" but just "scan, reconstruction" and you end up with two identical you's first, would you be fine with simply being killed then?
Inspired by an Outer Limits episode.
Your comment reminded me of a old Outer Limits episode, "Think Like A Dinosaur" where the teleportation "equation had to be balanced." After a delayed confirmation, the technician had to kill the original woman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Outer_Limits)
I think we both speak of the same thing, but I come from dramaturgy background. Story is story, no matter the genre or medium. At its core, story is always about change in the character through dramatic arc. If there is none, it's journalism, for lack of better words. Mechanics are vastly different through media. For example, in screenplays you get to write only what you hear and what you see. Essay form is allowed only to explain to the creators of ultimate form what you mean.
When you shed all the layers of genres, when you come down to the basic principles of dramaturgy, you're left with the core of storytelling that's in all stories ever told. From Plato's Cave to Aristotelian unities onwards to Star Wars and Seinfeld, there are certain core principles which hold true in form and structure. Form, not formula. In dramatic arc and story structure there are elements which morph and trade places and these, along with psychological and visual motifs make a genre. It's probably valid approach to view/interpret this on a whole other level, and that's the beauty of it. This is just my viewpoint based on some experience and background in dramaturgy. It's a view on abstract principles of storytelling where you get to manipulate form and structure itself before you materialise it into particularities. Kind of like virtual functions, or better yet a class diagram of a story before you write it down. Dramatic theory is not competing with literary theory - it complements it, specializes it. I took dramatic theory as a heavy weapon which I find extremely useful in my work, but I didn't dwell much further into literary theory. I took some bits and pieces that I find useful for my work, like intertextuality (esp. biblical - which is tropey as it gets, Star Wars for example and Hero's Journey, but most modern literature as well)... etc. I have colleagues which are far more well-versed in literature theory than I am for when I need insight. I'm more concerned with dramatic mechanics and structure, because that's what I do and what interests me.
What I'm saying is that behind all of the layers of a genre, there is a common subset to all stories. If you start with that and build towards a genre, you get to see the specifics of how it modulates that core structure. SF, in that regard, is always heavily biased towards internal-driven change with accentuated wants and needs switch[1] where character is in an extreme psychological situation driven by an extreme physical situation flared by science. Character is driven into a corner where he/she has to act on his core flaw in order to achieve the need in order to change. Whereas fantasy has a character on a journey both physical and psychological through which he/she overcomes the flaw in his character in order to act on it when third act kicks in.
It's a bit of an abstract way of thinking, but I don't know how else to put it without first explaining all of the intro to dramatic theory, hah.
[1] Wants vs needs is the epitome of character arc mechanics. There's something character wants that drives his story arc, only to be exposed to his actual needs (what he really wants). Shedding his wants and fulfilling that need he discovered he overcomes his major flaw and thus changes his character.
Now, if you view through prism of that mechanics (core one though) and go back to genre structures you can clearly see where most differ (not all, there are blurry ones!). For example, if you look at Star Wars or Conan which are fantasy (one with SF theme and one with fantasy theme) - there's a clear flaw in the character that gets replaced by a need and fulfilled on the journey (actual one). Be it Force training vs Dagobah cave or Sword training vs Valeria. It's an actual quest! Now look at a clear-cut SF, for example Inconstant Moon episode from Outer Limits (check that out if you haven't!) or any of the more fabled STNG or DS9 episodes. In Inconstant Moon, main character realises this might be the final night of his (and everyone's life - Sun has gone Nova on the other side of the Earth (it's nighttime), and he notices Moon is exceptionally bright because of it... so he calls up his ex girlfriend (wants) and he becomes more open and free (needs).. or in DS9 Pale Moonlight (Moon, again!) where cptn. Sisko wants an action attack plan or whatever only to need to become vile and dirty character in order to win, thus overcoming his flaw (being a good guy)... no quest. When we return to Dune, that's where lines get blurred and there's an endless debate.
I mean, I could go on forever and we all could probably be right to most extents. This is just my way of thinking. Flair on top of all of that is of least concern, but is the most visible in a genre. By that I mean spaceships vs swords or whatever. It's just a motif. Hence why people commonly confuse Star Wars as an SF - which it isn't at all. Also a reason why new Star Trek movies aren't really SF. It's a fantasy or in ST case action story with an SF theme on top.
I'm really passionate about this subject (storytelling) and we have debates like these almost on a daily basis because we all love it. We all agree on one thing and that's that everything lies in character development and arc and grows from there, so excuse my elaborate intro to debating the topic!
There was also an Outer Limits episode with a similar theme if I recall correctly. There is a lot of cross-pollination of ideas, and I think that's a good thing.
Reminds me of that Outer Limits episode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Finger
This is a correction to my above post. The actual episode was from The Outer Limits series. Link below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Outer_Limits)
There was an episode of The Outer Limits (featuring Wil Wheaton) in which a ship destined for Mars got turned around and accidentally destroyed Earth.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Light_Brigade_%28The_Outer_Limits%29